[quote author="Rowen Atkinson"]Can I suggest a “Favourite Poets”, “Favourite Authors”, Favourite Book” etc threads to handle these? Otherwise I’ll have to start the “Anyone like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart ” thread..
For the wonder of romantic love try WH Auden’s (one of my favourite poets) Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon.....
There’s more but that will have to do.
And when romantic love dies you can’t beat Harry Graham’s poem Opportunity
When Mrs Gorm (Aunt Eloise)
Was stung to death by savage bees,
Her husband (Prebendary Gorm)
Put on his viel, and took the swarm.
He’s publishing a book, next May,
On ‘How to Make Bee-keeping Pay.’
My favouritest quote in the history of ever. The two opening paragraphs of Borrower of the Night, by Elizabeth Peters.
When I was ten years old, I knew I was never going to get married. Not only was I six inches taller than any boy in the fifth grade - except Matthew Finch, who was five ten and weighed ninety-eight pounds - but my IQ was as formidable as my height. It was sixty points higher than that of any of the boys - except the aforesaid Matthew Finch. I topped him by only thirty points.
I know - this isn’t the right way to start a narrative, if I hope to command the sympathy of the reader. A narrator should at least try to sound modest. But believe me, I’m not bragging. The facts are as stated, and they are a handicap, not a cause for conceit. If there is anything worse than being a tall girl, it is being a tall smart girl.
And anything and everything from the immortal Blackadder.
There must be long tradition of beauty-ugly insults/retorts as this long gone, cruel yet quick witted example testifies:
Bessie Braddock, M.P. “Winston, you’re drunk!”
Winston Churchill: “Bessie, you’re ugly. And tomorrow morning I shall be sober.”
And here’s another quick witted retort:-
Lady Astor: “Winston, if you were my husband, I should flavour your coffee with poison.”
Winston Churchill: “Madam, if I were your husband, I should drink it”
Having a special place for Qohelet means that the following two quotes purportedly from Woody Allen are quite apt:
[quote author="Woody Allen"]I’m not afraid of dying - I just don’t want to be there when it happens!
and the second, which also could have been Gilgamesh speaking:
[quote author="Woody Allen"]I don’t want to become immortal through my work. I want to become immortal through not dying.
I once looked up ‘circumincession’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, as you do, and came across what seemed to me a singularly apposite quote, attributed to one Fitzedward Hall, Modern English, 1873:
[quote author="F. Hall"]A callow student of theology confesses that he is fairly gravelled by the hypostatic circumincession.
(It might, but probably won’t, help to mention that ‘circumincession’ was the standard scholastic term for what both earlier and later theologians call ‘perichoresis’—the earlier because they write in Greek, the later because… well, perhaps that speculation belongs on the Trinity thread .)
While we’re on the topic of quotes, if anyone can help me find the source of the one below, I’d be grateful. It’s a useful piece of advice to writers, apparently from the very paragon of limpid prose, C. S. Lewis:
[quote author="C. S. Lewis possibly"]Keep a strict eye on eulogistic and dyslogistic adjectives—they should diagnose (not merely blame) and distinguish (not merely praise).
[quote author="CS Lewis in ‘The Weight of Glory’"]It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you may talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet if at all only in a nightmare.
All day long we are in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities it is with awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal, Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or ever lasting splendours.
Also another of my favourite writers:
[quote author="J. Heinrich Arnold in ‘Discipleship’"]We must become “narrow” in the right way—“narrow” in the sense that we live only for Christ. I do not mean at all that our lives should show more religiosity. There is no one as broadhearted as the crucified Christ, whose outstretched arms seek all men. It is a matter of decisiveness in one’s heart, of living only for Christ. If we have this decisiveness, we will have broad hearts, though not, of course, in the worldly sense of tolerance for anything and everything.
Come on thread lurkers, register and give us some poetry or a joke or something. Unlike Red Faces nights, you can delete anything you’re embarrassed about. Just don’t break copyright!
Suggested forum motto: You can be as profound as Homer!!!
As a musician, I happen to think Gwen Harwood is pure gold!
A Scattering of Ashes
Music alone can make me hold
my breath, thinks Krote as he catches
his bus. A chill wind sighs. Bone cold
he rubs his hands as something scratches
a blank part of his memory.
Today’s not right. Where should he be?
Beethoven’s funeral. Torchbearer
Schubert held lilies bound in black;
afterwards with Randhartinger
and Lachner, heavy of heart, went back
to the Mehlgruber Inn, to toast
the one whom death would summon first.
Schubert himself.
Krote recalls
why death is showing him its sting,
and why he thinks of funerals;
he must attend a Scattering
of Ashes, is engaged to play
at the crematorium today.
There he arrives immersed in gloom.
An earlier customer’s not through.
The mourners, in a waiting room,
wait, since there’s nothing else to do.
An old lady leans close to say,
“My beloved friend knew Massenet.”
Krote’s impressed. “And Saint-Saens too.
She was in Faure’s singing class.
Now I don’t know what I shall do.
I thought I’d be the first to pass
away. We were friends for fifty years.”
She weeps, and Krote’s close to tears.
They are summoned. Krote lifts the lid
of a fancy electronic job.
Is this an organ? God forbid.
He fiddles off a plastic knob,
fumbles the pedals with cold feet,
plays what’s required, and takes a seat
beside Old Friend while prayers are said.
Because of copyright I probably should stop there - but the crematorium organ reaction is spot on!! Some of the things I’ve had to play - twanky plastic keys with letter names that light up like I might have forgotten; little toothpick sized pedals; and odd designs where the lower keys on the keyboard are actually selectors of sound (a super-budget version of stops). Is this an organ? God forbid. My sentiments exactly!
The old lady then gives Krote a small carved wooden casket that turns out to be full of the collected whiskers of her dead cats, which Krote accidentally drops on the floor. Harwood simply says: “The Cat is on the Mat.” Fabulous stuff.
Then there’s another poem about a music lesson. Only a real pianist & organist (which Harwood was) could capture it all so well!!
The opening lines of one of the funniest books ever written: “Augustus Carp Esq. Autobiography”:
It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, and surely the present is one of them, when to do so is manifestly unnecessary. In an age when every standard of decent conduct has either been torn down or is threatened with destruction; when every newspaper is daily reporting scenes of violence, divorce, and arson; when quite young girls smoke cigarettes and even, I am assured, sometimes cigars; when mature women, the mothers of unhappy children, enter the sea in one-piece bathing-costumes; and when married men, the heads of households, prefer the flicker of the cinematograph to the Athanasian Creed - then it is obviously a task, not to be justifiably avoided, to place some higher example before the world.
Why no, no one here was watching Blackadder late last night to finish some knitting to a deadline. Nooooo. (But I’m *almost* done!)
[quote author="Blackadder in The Queen of Spain’s Beard"]So what you are trying to tell me, Baldrick, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else you have never seen.
[quote author="Sophie J. Kunze"]Why no, no one here was watching Blackadder late last night to finish some knitting to a deadline. Nooooo. (But I’m *almost* done!)
[quote author="Blackadder in The Queen of Spain’s Beard"]So what you are trying to tell me, Baldrick, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else you have never seen.
BLACKADDER???!!!!!
what channel? What time?
my favourite Blackadder quote is from II, when Nanny is explaining about the birth of Queenie;
Your father really wanted a boy and so, when you were born, we all cried out, “It’s a boy!!!”. Then someone pointed out that you had no winkle and so we cried out, “heavens be praised! A boy without a winkle - it’s a miracle!!!”
Until someone pointed out that a boy without a winkle is a girl…
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